


5-The Geometry of Desire

by WritestuffLee



Series: The Warrior's Heart, Volume 1, Early Days [5]
Category: Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: M/M, POV, PWP
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 1999-08-10
Updated: 1999-08-10
Packaged: 2017-12-10 12:09:41
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,752
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/785902
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WritestuffLee/pseuds/WritestuffLee
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Qui-Gon wonders what the heck hit him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	5-The Geometry of Desire

I have a new vice now that we’re lovers, Padawan: I love to watch you sleep, as you’re doing now in my arms in a ship’s bunk on the way back to Coruscant.

We made a very gentle love this evening because you’re still healing from your injuries, and you nestled against me afterwards, sighing, and fell deeply asleep almost instantly. The difference in our height allows me to tuck you under my chin where I can feel your breath against my shoulder and lie with our legs entwined. Despite that difference, our bodies seem to match like pieces of a puzzle, the planes and angles of our flesh fitting together seamlessly. And when I’m inside you, love, making you cry out, it seems to me we are really one person, our bodies one continuum. I confess I’ve found nothing I like better, except, perhaps, watching you sleep.

It’s easy enough to indulge this small vice, too easy, perhaps, like most vices, but situation feeds it as much as desire. All my life I have been an early riser, a lover of morning meditations that include sunrise. You, when not pressed by the demands of my schedule, prefer sunset and late nights. Most mornings, I wake you, but first I watch you for a time, partially in wonder at my luck, partially in pity for you. I hate to wake you. You are only a few years out of the stage where every spare moment is spent in eating or sleeping to fuel your growing body (or in sex to sooth your hormones), and you still need more of all those things than I (though you’ve rejuvenated my moribund libido to an alarming degree)—but sleep especially, at this moment when you are still recovering, so I have the pleasure of watching you often.

I love doing so because, in your sleep, I see the laughter in your face that being raised in the Temple and training to become a Jedi have suppressed in you. I suspect that if you had not been given to us, you would have grown into a raucous young man who smiled and laughed aloud without reserve. I can easily imagine you engaged in any of the games and foolishness the young indulge in, risking your pretty neck in fast or high or otherwise unsafe pursuits, and finding it all very amusing simply because you are the age when everyone is immortal. Instead, you know all too well how mortal you are, and I can already see where your concentration and gravity will line your forehead. You were a grave child, too, I was told, and a very serious young Padawan learner, more serious than most. Your duties and training are very weighty matters to you, as they should be. That fact should have impressed me much sooner than it did, and would have if not for the well of grief and guilt I inhabited when first we met.

I still see your amusement peering out tentatively during the day, closely held in check, displayed in the ironic arch of your eyebrows and the wry incline of one side of your beautiful mouth. But I would love to see you smile more often and more openly, and I suspect you don’t in part because of your gift. Unlike any of my other apprentices, you have a talent for sensing distant disturbances in the Force and for seeing the possibilities of the future in your dreams. The gift is strong enough that it has become, especially on this last mission, a burden to you, as you struggle with the consequences of knowing about events that may or may not happen, that you may or may not be able to change. That knowledge steals your humor and joy, something I try to give back to you in the life we have together.

Restrained and dignified as you are awake, you sleep as you make love: with complete abandon, restlessly, even when you’re untroubled. Sharing your bed, I often wake to find myself relegated to its edge, coverless, while you have either flung the bedclothes aside and sprawled across most of it in acute angles, or lie balled up in the middle with all the blankets in a cocoon around you. Wonderfully, I wake just as often to find you entwined with me in a complicated helix of limbs, though never for long. Even when you go to sleep quietly in my arms, you soon extricate yourself from them to roam through your dreams. And yet I’ve seen you sit so still in meditation that wild creatures will light on your shoulder or climb onto your knee. It’s as though all that pent-up energy of your youth must come out in your sleep, so tightly contained is it when you’re awake.

This past week you’ve been particularly restless, talking in your sleep and thrashing in instinctual flight, waking frightened and gasping, more so after the accident than before. After its irrefutable fact, your panic started to invade my sleep as well, having seen you buried in a wall of mud thick as poured ferrocrete and felt your consciousness snap off like a shorted circuit under it. You were buried so deeply it took three of us and the finesse of the Force to free you from that glutinous muck. When finally we did, you were unrecognizable, covered in filth, drowning in it, one arm dislocated, the other broken, lying askew on the soaked ground in a sickening parody of the positions in which you sleep, your heart crushed, your breath stifled.

I hope you never know the terror that seized me then, when we pulled you out still grasping the rope I’d thrown you and the coat of the young woman you’d tried to save. In that single moment I saw my life ending as well, as I thought it had when Tahl . . . when Tahl left me. Even now I cannot say it. Even now with you warm in my arms as she should have been, with my love for you filling me as my love for her had. Though it has been four years, it still takes so little to uncover that great gaping emptiness she left behind, something you cannot fill because you are not she. But if you had not been with me then, I would have followed her into the Force. At that moment when you lay dead at my feet, I knew I would have to follow you, that there was nothing inside to keep me alive without you.

We forced the dirt and water out of your lungs and I watched you cough and vomit violently and helplessly with such relief that I almost wept. It was all I could do to relinquish you to the medics and try to help the others, especially when I knew in my heart there was no help for any but you.

That was a hard lesson for me to reminded of: that I am dangerously preoccupied by your well-being. After Tahl, I never expected to feel about anyone as I did about her, as I do about you—especially you. I have known you, after all, seven years now, nearly since you were a child. Only the kind of love I feel for you has changed, not its quantity or quality or existence. But the intensity of feelings I experienced when we pulled you from the muck hasn’t been equaled since the day my last apprentice turned against me, since I lost Tahl. Why should I suddenly care so much more? Yet I do, and it frightens me.

I did not sleep the three nights you were recovering. In the ten short days we’ve been lovers, I’ve grown so used to your perpetual motion that I wake when you lie still too long. An entirely empty bed was impossible to face. Watching you suspended in the bacta tank for two days—a respirator tube down that elegant throat, the rest of you pierced with IV lines and catheters, boneless and unmoving in the gelid fluid—was chilling, nauseating. Watching you in your drugged sleep through the following day, eyelids flickering, legs and hands twitching—hardly movement at all, for you—was more harrowing than I could have imagined. I’ve come upon you meditating in more stillness, the rise and fall of your breath your only movement, and yet you seemed quick and lively even then, a packet of contained energy. Stuporously asleep, you were empty and hollow, a preview of death. I could hardly bear it.

Now, the fear that seizes you in the night makes my heart ache. I know it will pass. I know it’s only your unconscious memories of being buried alive, of your guilt at surviving where your friend did not and over your failure to save her, and the memories of the dream that foretold it. But I hear you whimper in your sleep, feel you shivering, and smell the fear in your sweat and I want nothing more than to wipe it from your mind. I could do it. You would remember nothing, either of the incident or my intrusion. But it would serve no purpose but to ease my own feelings, and rob you of the kind of pain and experience that make us who we are. So I do the only other things I can: I hold you and wake you gently and ease you back into a calmer sleep.

You curl into me gratefully when I do, a lunular curve of warm skin and solid flesh. I love following the arcs of your body with my hands, the way it slopes and rises from your shoulders down your back and over your lovely round ass, down your columnar thighs, over the little planes of delicate and sensitive skin at the backs of your knees, rounding out again in your muscular calves and narrowing to a line in the tendon at your ankles. Supine on your stomach is my favorite view of you, if not quite my favorite position.

In that, I prefer you up on your knees and elbows, your legs spread at an acute angle and revealing the tight circle of muscle between the taut hemispheres, the tender ovoids of your testes, the stiff cylinder of your cock, and the arch of your spine as I slide into you.

I am, obviously, hopelessly besotted with you. If that cannot make you laugh, then truly your sense of humor has been murdered, that this old man who could be your father feels like a teenager again around you. A horny teenager.

But you would tell me I am not old, despite the grey in my hair, the morning stiffness in my joints, the slowing of my reflexes. Irrelevant; inconvenient but temporary; imperceptible, you would say dismissively. I look at you and see a young man in his glory, as I once was, and though I would not again be your age, I feel a certain wistfulness for the sense of entitlement that goes with it. Arrogance has never been a weakness of yours, so you wear the privilege of your youth and gender with an unconscious grace. Life belongs to you right now, and you have no need to be told so.

Which only makes your love for me more baffling. What I would find attractive in you is, perhaps, too obvious, and not, in truth, everything I love about you: youth, beauty, strength, grace, even innocence, thought there is precious little of the latter remaining in you. Jedi grow out of it early. The physical attributes are certainly distinguished enough to have attracted other partners to you, though none of them were more than casual. I wonder if they saw the same things below your distractingly lovely surface that I do: your utter dedication, your courage, your hardheaded stubbornness, your kindness, your enormous capacity for love. There are times when we are making love that I feel that capacity is fathomless. There are times in the past when I have felt the same. Without that bottomless love of yours, Tahl’s loss would have damaged me far more than it did. Though you are not as acutely aware of the Living Force as I would like you to be, it gathers around you like iron filings to a magnet and influences you more than you know. Sometimes you literally bristle with it. You take in what I give you and return it tenfold. It’s this that drew me to you: your warm, passionate heart, your pure soul.

That would make you laugh, were I to say it to you, and it would be ironic and a little bitter, that laugh. I wish you could see yourself as I have come to, instead of seeing your weaknesses and failures foremost. You are much stronger, much more competent, more able and more intelligent than you think yourself. You’ve advanced more quickly than any of my apprentices, even Xanatos, whom I thought an extraordinary pupil, because, despite your grumbling about my constant teaching, everything is a lesson to you, even our lovemaking. I expect you’ll be ready for your Trials by the time you’re twenty-five, and you will be surprised when I tell you that. Perhaps not, if I can instill in you the confidence you’re lacking in your own abilities.

And it is an obvious lack at the moment. I can see it in the way you hold yourself, and in the outburst of rage I finally managed to provoke from you yesterday. Though your words were directed at me, you were angry with yourself for your uncertainty. You tell me you knew what was going to happen but you’re as aware as I that even Master Yoda does not pretend to predict the future with any accuracy, and still you saw that as your failure. Have I been so hard on you, or is it your own need to prove yourself that makes you so critical of your own performance? I wish I knew, in the same way I wish I knew for certain whether you desire me because I am your master, or because you’ve come to love the man who plays that role—or if you know the difference. Sometimes I wonder if I do.

That question keeps me awake more often than you know, and fills my meditations, because there must, _must,_ be a difference between the two in your mind, or I have made an appalling and potentially disastrous error in judgement. To take you as my lover when you think of me only as your master would be the grossest abuse of my authority and power over you, amounting to little more than rape in the end. And yet sometimes I want you so badly that it seems not like abuse at all, but merely a privilege of my authority. Perhaps Xan’s sense of entitlement was not strictly his own.

From the day we first met, I sensed in you a deep need to please me, and I would be strolling carelessly down the path to the Dark Side to use that need of yours to fulfill my own desires. No master of any integrity would do such a thing. I have always known this, always believed it, in my years of training padawans, but now, presented with the facts of your willing love and my incontrovertible desire, the line where one course of action becomes another has become indistinct to me. When you kiss me, or touch me, or let me take you in my arms, are you seeing Master Jinn or merely Qui-Gon? Do you have your own misgivings about which one of us you most desire? Are you indeed old enough at the advanced age of twenty to know your own mind in this matter? Are either of us?

How can two people who have lived together so closely for so long, know so little of each other’s hearts?

You press yourself more tightly against me in your sleep, away from the cold bulkhead of our cabin, and I feel as though I can never be close enough to you. Only the empty spaces of electron orbits separate us, and that is too far. Somewhere between us is a place, not where you stop and I begin, but where we two are one. The only thing I know for certain now is that I want you beside me that closely always.


End file.
